One Village, Five Lists: Bluesquare's Plan to Close the Community Health Data Gap in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Published on: October 2026
Introduction (French)
Health programmes need reliable information about the communities they serve. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), however, programmes working in the same villages may rely on different community lists, population figures, and geographic records. This fragmentation makes it harder to coordinate services and determine whether communities are being reached.
With funding from the Umbrella Fund for Geospatial Interventions, supported by the Gates Foundation and managed by Dev-Afrique Development Advisors, Bluesquare will help address this challenge in Kasai Central and Maniema provinces. The project will support government institutions and health programmes to develop, validate, and use a shared community reference list.
The Missing Layer in Congo's Health Data
The DRC has made progress in improving the quality and availability of geospatial health data. More health facilities now have geographic coordinates, while the boundaries used to organise health services are being digitised and harmonised. These include health zones and the smaller health areas within them, which provide an important geographic foundation for planning and managing services.
The Ministry of Health and its programmes use this information to identify where services are needed, organise vaccination and disease-response activities, and review how health services are distributed. Yet the information becomes less consistent at the community level, where services must ultimately reach people.
Information about villages, camps, hamlets, and other settlements remains fragmented across health programmes. The Expanded Programme on Immunization uses one list of communities for planning, while the malaria programme uses another. Programmes addressing cholera and diarrhoeal diseases, neglected tropical diseases, and sleeping sickness also maintain separate lists.
Although these programmes use health zones as a common reference, their records are not consistently aligned below that level. The same community may appear under different names, coordinates, or population figures. Some settlements may appear on one programme’s list but remain absent from another. Without a sustained mechanism to reconcile records, validate discrepancies, and keep information current, programmes may repeat data collection and verification already undertaken elsewhere.
The consequences extend beyond inefficient data management. Inconsistent records make it harder to coordinate services, decide where to deploy vaccination teams, allocate resources, compare results, and assess whether communities have been reached. A shared community reference is therefore a practical foundation for more coordinated health planning.
Building on an Earlier Government-Led Effort
The effort to establish a unified community reference list began in May 2025, when the Directorate of Primary Health Care convened health programmes, including immunisation, malaria, cholera, neglected tropical diseases, and sleeping sickness, to develop a shared approach. The process later stalled because resources for continued coordination were unavailable.
Bluesquare’s Umbrella Fund-supported project will help government institutions and participating programmes resume this work, building on existing national systems and data. These include the Health Information Division’s adoption of IASO, an open-source data collection and management platform; the updated health-service structure; the community health site mobile application operating across all 26 provinces; and updated settlement data from GRID3, a geospatial and demographic data programme.
The National Health Georegistry architecture provides an additional foundation for bringing these resources together. Rather than creating a parallel system, the investment will support a move from separate programme lists towards a common, government-managed community reference.
How Bluesquare Will Support the Development of a Shared List
Over nine months, Bluesquare will work with the Health Information Division and participating health programmes to develop and test a shared community reference list in Kasai Central and Maniema. The provinces were selected based on partner presence, stakeholder readiness, available data, and practical access considerations.
The work will proceed in three stages. First, existing village and settlement lists will be consolidated and compared with GRID3 settlement data to identify duplicates, inconsistent names, missing settlements, and gaps in geographic coordinates. Second, the consolidated list will be loaded into IASO for review and validation by health area and health zone teams, drawing on local knowledge to confirm community names, locations, and missing records. Third, the validated list will be integrated into the community-level DHIS2 health information system, enabling participating programmes to use a common reference for planning, monitoring, and reporting.
Government institutions will lead validation and management of the shared list. The Directorate of Primary Health Care will provide institutional direction, the Health Information Division will manage the technical process, and the National Agency for Clinical Engineering and Health Information will certify the results before wider validation. Bluesquare will configure the platforms, support data consolidation and validation, and strengthen government capacity to manage the shared reference.
Dev-Afrique, as manager of the Umbrella Fund, will co-develop the monitoring framework with the local team, tracking geolocation coverage, participation by health zones and areas in validation, and uptake of the unified list across programmes and information systems.
This approach places government institutions at the centre while connecting existing programme records, digital platforms, settlement datasets, and local knowledge through a common process.
What the Project is Expected to Change
By the end of the pilot, health programmes in Kasai Central and Maniema are expected to have access to a more consistent, government-validated reference for the communities they serve. The shared list is intended to support malaria control, polio response, routine immunisation, and other health services that depend on reliable information about community locations and populations. It should also reduce repeated data collection and verification by enabling participating programmes to work from the same reference.
The pilot will test how the National Health Georegistry framework can work in practice, bringing together national standards, programme records, digital platforms, settlement data, and local validation. It will document procedures, institutional responsibilities, and the resources required to develop and maintain the reference, including a unit cost per province based on pilot expenditure and a proposed sequence for possible national expansion.
The experience in Kasai Central and Maniema will give government and partners practical evidence to assess whether and how the approach could be applied elsewhere. Continued government ownership, routine use by health programmes, and regular updates will be essential to sustaining its value.
Ultimately, better community health planning starts with a shared understanding of the communities being served. Through the Gates Foundation-funded Umbrella Fund for Geospatial Interventions, Bluesquare and Dev-Afrique are supporting a government-led transition from fragmented programme lists towards a common foundation for more coordinated, evidence-informed health services.
